Brian Cross aka B+
Brian Cross first encountered hip-hop in the early ’80s, a meeting that sealed a lifelong love affair between the music, the culture and the young Irish photographer. Cross eventually moved to Los Angeles for post-graduate studies, where one of his professors was the influential author of City Of Quartz, Mike Davis. Davis encouraged Brian to combine his love of hip-hop culture, photography and politics. This led to It’s Not About A Salary – Rap And Resistance In L.A., one of the earliest published books about hip-hop. The tome captured photos and stories from many of the early exponents of hip-hop on the West Coast alongside a political and cultural history of the city. In session at the 2005 Red Bull Music Academy, this inspired photographer, director and historian discusses the Brasilintime documentary and tells us how he finds new and innovative ways to view hip-hop (and the world).
Audio Only Version Transcript: Torsten Schmidt I think both Brian and me are glad that I had the dignity to shave my hair off, because otherwise we’d be looking like identical twins now. We could be running a really weird Jacko competition. The reason why we’d be looking that way is because we probably like to do things that are not all too thinkable in the first place. What you’re about to see is an almost finished version of a particular movie, which is... Brian Cross Brasilintime. Torsten Schmidt Now in a nutshell, Brasilintime elevator pitch, we got 11 floors, what is it? Brian Cross Yes, in two sentences. Basically it started as an idea to bring some of the classic jazz and soul drummers that had played on a lot of the classic breaks together with some of the DJs that live in LA. To sort of have a conversation, it became a short film called Keepintime. Then at screenings of the film, this is kind of all explained at the beginning of this, but I’ll do it. At screenings of the film they would play together. It kind of became popular and the Red Bull Music Academy invited us to screen the film, the short, in London. In the beginning of 2002, is that right? The beginning of 2002, after screening the short, myself and Torsten went and had lunch with another friend of ours, Fergus Murphy. They told me they were going to do the next Red Bull Music Academy in São Paulo, Brazil. Would I be interested in bringing, basically, J. Rocc, Cut Chemist, Babu, then it turned into Madlib, to Brazil. I said I would be and that I would also like to bring the drummers. That’s what we ended up doing. We brought the DJs and the drummers to Brazil where we ended up hooking up with a bunch of Brazilian drummers and a DJ. We did this show, and I’ve basically spent the last three years figuring out how to make the show into a film. That’s basically what we have today. Torsten Schmidt What’s your background, you? Brian Cross Photographer. I’ve been doing... Well I did a book in ’93 called It’s Not About a Salary: Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles, which is kind of an oral history of rap and hip-hop in Los Angeles, pre-The Chronic. Since then, subsequently, I’ve done, I don’t know, more than 100 album covers. Most recently, I don’t know, what have I done recently? The Damian Marley record. What else have I done lately? A bunch of shit for Stones Throw, Danger Doom, Blackalicious. All the Jurassic [5] shit, Dilated [Peoples]. Back to Freestyle Fellowship and Eazy-E in those days I made my living doing album covers. I’ve always tried to contribute in some way to the community that pays my rent. Keepintime started out as one of those wacky ideas, like, “Wow wouldn’t it be cool if we could use the idea of a photo shoot to bring some people together to have a conversation that otherwise might not have the opportunity to do that?” Torsten Schmidt What was the key moment in that short film for you? Brian Cross The key moment in the film, when everybody saw it, was the moment when Paul Humphrey replays Cut’s beat juggling back to him. The key moment in the studio that day was the... J. Rocc started pitch-phasing a bassline, a Cannonball Adderley bassline over the drum beat that they were playing, and that was where everybody suddenly went, like, “Ohhh. Something really original that’s never happened before is happening right now.” Not that it’s never happened before, but something that we’d never thought would happen is happening. Torsten Schmidt How pissed off were you that that was not part of the film? Brian Cross It is. It’s in the film, but it’s a part of the film that doesn’t function as a breakthrough moment, just because that’s how film works sometimes. I’m sure when you see this you’ll remember things that were like, “Whoa. How come that didn’t end up in the... ?” It’s just once you get into the process of editing or whatever, it just becomes something different. Torsten Schmidt How hard was it for you to learn to let go? I mean all us here in the room have to do the same thing when you’re editing music, and you have these great ideas, these great breaks, and you can only use so much in a track. Obviously there you have the same thing, because it probably just doesn’t translate as well as you imagine. Brian Cross Well, I mean there’s... Letting go is the key I think for me. I’ve never met anybody who doesn’t have a good idea for something, whether it’s a record, a song, a script, whatever. A photo idea. The trick is to, number one, the first thing is to get it off the ground, and the second thing is to learn to let it go. It’s the hardest part really. I don’t know, I’ve studied this for a long time, and I pay attention to a lot of people. You got people like Sun Ra saying things like, “Make a mistake and do something right.” After a while you learn to embrace the mistakes and to realize this is as far as we can get it right now and we just have to start letting go. I’ve been going through that process for the last year. This thing started out as... There was an edit of this film that was over four hours long. We’re down to just under two hours now. Torsten Schmidt What’s the overall aim? Brian Cross We’re close. It’ll be around just under two hours. I thought we could get it down to a little bit shorter than that, but I’m happy with it now. I don’t want to fight it anymore, and I don’t want feel like I’m just taking things out for the sake of taking them out. It works kind of like a song a little bit. You guys can be the judge of that. Not that many people have seen it really, to be honest. Definitely not this version. Torsten Schmidt What are the things that you visually learned in this, while doing this? From taking your work as a photographer to moving images? Brian Cross Wow, a lot. Working in something that’s real time oriented as opposed to working on something where the time factor is less tangible. In making it the time factor is really important, but in the exhibition of it and the display of it you can, you know. Some people can take 15 minutes looking at the same photo and some people won’t barely blink an eye at it. When you put photos into a situation where they’re time-stamped, if you will, it becomes something entirely different, and it’s like, “Well. Do you really want to look at the pan for 30 seconds, or will 10 seconds do on this one?” Just started to think about ideas like that, and the key thing really is trying to understand how visuals change with sound, and how sound changes with visuals. We’re doing the sound mix for this right now, and it’s an absolutely beautiful recording. Thanks to you guys. But it’s 48 tracks of a lot of shit. Like six drummers, four DJs. My sound guy, that’s what he always says. He says that when babies are born they don’t learn to hear, they learn to un-hear. It’s about the process of mixing, for him anyway. His philosophy is what you don’t hear is more important sometimes than what you do. You reach a tipping point where it becomes more about what you’re not hearing. All that kind of stuff. I don’t know, it’s kind of... Spent the last three years going to film school in some weird way. Torsten Schmidt It must be kind of weird if you say you’ve got this learning process of un-hearing, and as a photographer you have probably similar experience of un-seeing so you can capture the energy of a whole day, a whole week, or whatever, or a life even in that one still. Brian Cross It’s the same. The point of it is, is that babies when they’re born they... Everything is there, but everything is out of focus. The purpose of learning to see is to put something in focus, which means everything else will be out of focus. It’s kind of a similar thing, learning what to unsee. It’s like memory, total recall means the collapse of memory. Memory is really completely in a dialectical relationship with forgetting. One doesn’t exist without the other. I didn’t sleep last night, so maybe that accounts for... Torsten Schmidt We’ll probably relieve you for a second, and leave a couple of questions until later and let the movie speak for itself. Brian Cross Sounds good. Torsten Schmidt What are the things that you are really happy about now when you see it and that make you feel like... Or what are the things we should watch out for? Do you want us to go in there totally... Brian Cross Yes, just go in. I’m really, truly... Not that many people have seen this film, and certainly not that many people who have this area of specialty as music as you guys do. I’d be really interested to hear what you guys think. If you think it’s too long or you think, you know. Feel free. Let it out. If there’s things you don’t understand, if there’s parts that slide by without really not quite figuring out what it’s about, let’s hear it afterwards. It’d be great. It would help me, and maybe we can learn a little bit from each other. Torsten Schmidt Should we dim the lights, get out the popcorn? (video: ‘Brasilintime’ / applause) Brian Cross Thanks for sticking with it. For who’s left awake. Torsten Schmidt I guess one of the main challenges was to overcome the fact that you had three or four hours of purely rhythm-based stuff, and turn that into something watchable and take that beyond the concert and place it into context. Can you probably fill us in? Brian Cross Well, they played total for... Soundcheck’s like 45 minutes. The American part of the show before we ever brought any of the Brazilians out was like 45 minutes. Then all of them together on stage was like another hour. You remember, that part you were just watching, it was like quarter to four in the morning. It was like, ”Whoa, what the fuck am I doing out this late?” I wasn’t so much worried about that. It was kind of figuring out a way to balance it so that it wouldn’t just be another concert film. That was my thing. We had done the concert film thing, with the first one. It’s cool, but I think somehow you don’t quite get the significance of the conversations that’s happening between people if you don’t have a context to understand who’s really talking to who. This is a thing people have always said about Keepintime. Even though all the information was there, it’s on the DVD, but it’s somehow finding a way to map, like, the stories into the music. All the stuff about turntablism, or records versus long-distance phone calls. All the weird threads that run through it were things that helped me to understand what exactly the story was, or to try and make a map of what the story was. It’s not linear really at all, it’s more like a spiral. That’s the way I describe it, it’s more like a spiral. It’s quite funny because a record is a spiral. That was it. I wasn’t really interested in making... It would have been easy to make the kind of travel film idea as well. That was the other sort of grand narrative, genre type of film that we could’ve done. The kind of Buena Vista thing, or whatever. So I wanted to break with that as well and try and make something more essay-istic. That was it. A lot of people that see it think it’s like two films. There’s the concert, that’s one thing and then there’s the story, that’s another thing. To me, it’s like they need each other, somehow. I don’t know if I’m even answering the question. Audience Member Hi. Can you talk about the 12”s that you released with music inspired in the film? About the Keepintime and the other one? Brian Cross You mean the 12”s that we put out of the remixes or the record they’re using in the film? Audience Member Both. Brian Cross OK. In the film, we made a record specifically for the film, where we took... It was basically like a community effort. It was like Otis, myself, Eric Coleman, my partner, Egon, J. Rocc, Carlos Niño, who does the whole Build An Ark thing. We all kind of had, over the years, had an interest in Brazilian music, so we thought like, “OK, everybody put their favorite parts, if you want, onto a CD and then we’ll sit down and huddle and figure out what’s the most appropriate and useful things to go into this kind of a context.” We knew what the context was, but it’s just that like... We had to do speed-learning, because not everybody had... I mean Madlib had the deepest Brazilian crates, but even before we went there the first time we just felt like we were scratching the surface, like the amount of music that had made it to us. Anyway, so we made a break record that we could use as a tool to kind of equalize it, so we wouldn’t have to rely so heavily on the [Super] Duck breaks and all the scratch records that are out there or whatever. Then from the first one, like as the same with this, all the concert parts are recorded with about as good a separation as you can get considering it’s a fucking big room and everything’s bleeding into everything, but it’s all close-mic’d, which is a problem on one level, because it makes it difficult to mix. On another level it allows us the possibility then of taking – which is what we did with the first one – taking like 12-minute chunks of the film and giving people the 24-track version of the 12 minutes and giving each person a different 12-minute section and then having them make music from that. It’s one thing to see the experience and to be there, and then it’s another thing to see the film. But then it’s another thing, again, to finish the loop, to make new music, which is what this whole fucking thing is about anyway. We’ve done a series of 12”s now with... Yeah, some fucking great people have done mixes from King Britt, Shadow, Cut, Oh No, Otis, I don’t know, who else did remixes for us? Nobody, Elvin. All the heads. Obviously, we’re going to try and do the same and a little bit more, push it a little further with this one, because there’s more music and there’s more audio, cool audio to mess with as well. Damn, fools are stuck. Come on Torsten. OK, stay where you are. Audience Member How many people came to the show? Brian Cross I think it was like 1,100. There was a lot of people tried to get in as well. We’re very fortunate. We’ve kind of had that experience repeatedly. I guess there was another 500 people apparently outside who couldn’t get in. It was only two weeks out from it that we actually nailed the venue and were able to announce it and everything, but it was just... People understand, I think or have come to understand that it’s a totally one-off thing, and even if we go back there and bring all those same guys that it’s going to be completely a different thing. Audience Member [inaudible]. Brian Cross It’s, obviously, the process is still going on, I guess. That’s why I was up all night last night. The most difficult part of it is... Having anything that’s 48-tracks and that has 48 tracks of automation and then making edits, which is what we have to do. You really have to cut the 48 tracks. We’re not like just making a two-track and then cutting the two-track. We’re really trying to make the real edits. I don’t know how well you know Pro Tools, but like... Audience Member How does it sound live? Brian Cross Live it sounds crazy, dude. You know, like you do your own editing. That’s what it’s like. It’s like the craziest jam you’ve ever heard and you do your own editing. If you’re standing there, you might just be focusing on Wilson or Paul or James or Otis or whatever and you’ll make sense of it yourself. Really if you’re standing there in front of it, it’s just kind of cacophonous, really. It’s pretty mad. It has its moments. There’s unmistakable moments where everything drops suddenly, there’s that kind of moment. But it’s pretty chaotic. To go back and to try and figure out what’s important... You know, like what I was saying earlier, like what you shouldn’t be listening to right now is really the key to it. It’s kind of like, you know... James’s kick is incredible, but right now it’s kind of fucking up the groove so just let’s lose it. You just have to be kind of brutal about it. Then it’s weird, because then there’s times when you’re looking at the picture and you’re kind of like, “Damn, we just heard his snare and now we seen him playing the snare again and where the fuck is it? It’s gone.” Or it’s not gone, but it’s barely there or whatever. Yeah, it’s kind of psychotropic, like a trip, there is like too much information, really. The old-school way to do it would be to put four or 10 mics, like overhead-style and just let it happen. There’s for and against, you know what I mean? I just like the idea of trying to make it something that we can then glean a whole bunch of new stuff from and the best way to do that is by close-mic’ing. Yeah, it’s kind of a trip. Audience member How many times a week do you [inaudible]? Torsten Schmidt It doesn’t really happen like that for me. I just go through periods of, like, feeling, like, ill with it, just feeling disgusted and like I want to leave it and forget about it. I’ve gone through... We have like in the last three years I’ve had a lot of... I’ve had 10 or 12 times where I was just like, “I don’t ever want to see this piece of shit again, ever. I don’t care.” But you just... Torsten Schmidt How do you overcome that? Brian Cross For me, it comes from a kind of responsibility to the people that were involved in the experience with me. It’s kind of like part of the deal of getting these guys to come out and to put blood and guts and to take chances. I mean Wilson doesn’t have... Paul Humphrey. We ain’t making their legend-status with this. Or James Gadson, you know what I mean? Derf, or any of the DJs, really, for that matter. It’s really everybody taking a risk together. Then my only responsibility, at the end of it, is to make something good that I feel like I can sign off on and that it represents what we do. That’s my life. You know I mean? It’s like walking away from my life or something. That’s what I do, so I try to bring that level of responsibility to everything that I do. Photos or films or whatever. Any time you do things that are ambitious or that are beyond your means or beyond your... What’s kind of easily finished, it becomes problematic. It does require a kind of like fooling yourself aspect, which I think is difficult for people to understand but... Torsten Schmidt On various levels you were trying to learn about cultures that were not necessarily the one that you were born into. Brian Cross Yep. Torsten Schmidt First of all, going to America and then taking it to a whole another ball game, to go to Brazil. Brian Cross Yeah. Torsten Schmidt Learning curves? Anything like that? Brian Cross I didn’t wake up one morning and decided like, “I must go to America and find out about hip-hop music and make photos and...” I mean, it reached me on a different level first. Then you kind of rationalize it afterwards and you come up with all kinds of reasons. For me, it’s just like following your ears or following your heart or following... I thrive and I live to be able to do things that make my heart beat a little bit faster, and so I don’t try to out-think myself or out-rationalize myself. I certainly don’t pay attention to a lot of the rules and regulations of this kind of stuff, where what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do. I try to avoid that and try to... I mean, learning curves is what it’s about anyway, really. Photography to me, it was never something with a fucking box around it. It was a way to express ideas and it doesn’t matter whether the instrument is like, what João says, whether it’s an MPC or whether it’s a Hasselblad, fuck it. If it requires a film, then fucking... I’ll figure it out. OK, let’s do a film then. Shit. Like Otis. Fuck it. I hear jazz right now. I don’t care that I’m a hip-hop producer and I’m supposed to work within the box of what that means or... He fucking threw the box out the window a long time ago. I think that the kind of groundwork that people need to do for stuff like this is to build a community of creative people around you that can support you when you go off the rails a little bit and you go into the unknown territory and you start taking risks. Without the community, say, around Otis doing the jazz thing in LA, he would have been waiting a long time before he would have got any love from press or from sales or from radio or whatever. But the community around him supported it, was interested in it and encouraged it and so it allowed him to get a little bit further with it. I feel privileged, like it’s the same for me. All of them dudes call me on the reg and like, “How is it going? Where is it at?” That kind of stuff and it just allows you to just go on I guess. Torsten Schmidt In an area where it’s a lot about what you know or what you seem to know and what you don’t know and those rules and so on and so on. I mean you’ve got a certain disadvantage, because you have the camera there. You’re recording evidence all the time of whatever is going on. You see all these records in there that are passed on and everyone will be like, “How could whoever pass on this record? He doesn’t know whatever, blah, blah, blah.” I mean it takes a little bit more balls, maybe, to go out there and show all that. Brian Cross Yeah, I suppose. I don’t really think of it in those terms, really. I just think of it like, “How can I contribute to this?” I see it as like something that feeds me, clothes me, puts a roof over my head. I’m interested in having it grow and be better. Whatever skills and knowledge and whatever it is that I bring to the table, then I just give of myself as best I can, as generously as I can and be as supportive as I can and create a kind of contributive environment. As opposed to like a more competitive environment, where it’s like, “Oh shit. Babs, you passed up on that Jorge Ben record. How absurd.” Babs is looking for different things than we are and I learned from him as much as I learned from... You know what I mean? It’s kind of like... Torsten Schmidt I mean on that side note, you... That way you probably give away a closer account about crate-digging and beat-digging culture than a lot of the documentaries that try to focus on it, where... What about it? Brian Cross Yeah. There’s a lot of people who have tried to do it. It’s a difficult story to tell and it’s complicated and it’s got a lot of layers to it and it’s not something to be taken lightly. I’ve been thinking about that. A lot of the cats that I know, that you know has been deep digging since the ’80s... Everybody’s thought about the idea of the documentary. It’s one of those things. When we went to Brazil, I didn’t expect that was the film we were making either. It just kind of snuck up on us. When I first went to Sao Paulo, I didn’t realize that it was that heavy of a record city, for example. I mean it shocked the shit out of me. I was shocked, delighted, elated. I had a reason to get all these guys there now, you know what I mean? I learned so much, so fast there, just by having access to that much music. It was a great experience, man. Thanks to this shit. Torsten Schmidt There’s just a couple of hints in that movie, mostly in stills that give you an idea of what kind of a different city São Paulo really is. Brian Cross Yeah. It’s a profoundly different. It’s different than any other city I’ve been in. Yeah, I mean music at every corner, really, music at every turn. You know the thing that I was most surprised, I guess, or that people would be most surprised about is when you go to somewhere and you have this sort of respect for the music, the indigenous music of that place, and you go there and then you meet people that are from there that are largely indifferent to it, for example. It’s this weird thing, where it’s kind of like somehow by proxy Cut Chemist can help Brazilian cats that appreciate Brazilian music. I had never seen that first-hand kind of weird triangulation thing happen before either. There’s a lot of layers in terms of how to understand the film or how to understand what’s going on in the film. That’s the way we made it. Torsten Schmidt Do you at any point feel as some sort of an intruder? Brian Cross No. Torsten Schmidt Is that something you learn as a photographer because you’re pointing and shooting? Brian Cross No, there’s times when you feel like an intruder for sure. It’s something you learn to live with. In São Paulo, no, not really. We had very good guides. Nats, Deb, Elka, people that took us out into the city and largely... Yeah, people were super welcoming and it was a good vibe, it was generally a good vibe. The drummers were incredible. Really excited at the idea of something like this, I mean Joāo especially. We learned so much from them. I always learn from them, but when the Brazilian cats came onboard, it was like, “Whoa,” it was really great. Torsten Schmidt It’s just hinted out at some stages in the movie, but one of the amazing things, really, was the amount of communication going on between the guys, who never met really. Brian Cross No. Torsten Schmidt There’s that situation where Joāo messes up the names and stuff. Whatever. It doesn’t really matter because... Brian Cross By that point, there’s been so many name fuck-ups in the film, it’s kind of emblematic. It’s almost like we don’t know how to even say each other’s names, but it’s fucking cool. I remember myself and Eric first went there, we were looking for the drummer from Azimuth and fucking like... Everybody’s like, “What band is Azimuth?” It’s [pronounced] Azimutchi. It was just, from the beginning there’s this... But I mean it runs through the film. You know the whole Comanche thing. It isn’t Comanche. It is Comanche. No it’s Willie Nelson. It’s just like, “Whoa.” “Apache” itself. For me, that was the difficult process, really. I spent a year and a half really figuring it out as far as understanding like, what is the story here? If it is something like a weird sleight of hand or a misnaming, then how do we make a film around that? After that, everything started to fall into place. It still took a year to do it. Torsten Schmidt Did you guys have Super Drumming in the ’80s? Brian CRoss Did we have what? Torsten Schmidt Super Drumming, the TV show? Brian Cross No. What’s that? Torsten Schmidt It was like the greatest drummer ever on earth and he would have like always two or three cats on one stage and they would just out-drum each other for like two hours. Brian Cross Whoa. Sounds like we should’ve had it, right? Torsten Schmidt Well, maybe not, because that was probably the good thing about being there, because, obviously, first that was one of our biggest fears, was like, “Oh please, not another Super Drumming.” Then, when we saw the shorts, it’s like, “Oh. Hang on. It’s something else.” Brian Cross Paul Humphrey says it best, he’s like, “No egos here, man. We just play it together.” Or Wilson says it like, “The best compliment I’ve ever received in my life is you don’t interfere.” That’s the idea. You could say the same about engineers. You could say the same about editors. You could say the same about photographers. The best photography is the one that you look at and you don’t think photography or the best editing is where you look at the film and the last thing you think of is editing or when you listen to the record, the last thing you think about is that somebody is in there adjusting the fucking frequencies. It’s the same thing with these cats. That’s something that comes with... Kind of seasoned or something that you’ve done for a long time and you’ve understood that you don’t need to say everything you ever wanted to say every time you open your mouth. You can go one sentence at a time and it will be okay, you know what I mean? Torsten Schmidt One sentence at the time. Thank you. Brian Cross Yeah, no, thanks very much. I’m happy to be able to come back here and do it. [applause]